In Review: 'Weapons,' 'Freakier Friday'

Weapons
Dir. Zach Cregger 
128 min.

Writer-director Zach Cregger must be the king of pitch meetings. With his wildly entertaining 2022 horror film Barbarian and now with his follow-up, the even more accomplished Weapons, Cregger has shown a particular talent for getting you on the hook for a story that ultimately goes to places you can’t possibly anticipate. A young woman in Detroit for a job interview arrives late at night to an Airbnb in a sketchy neighborhood, only to discover it’s been double-booked, but she decides to accept the occupant’s offer to sleep there anyway. That’s Barbarian. And that’s the first of many rugs that Cregger will delight in pulling. Weapons has an even juicier concept: At 2:17 a.m. one night, 17 schoolchildren, all from the same classroom, get out of bed, open the front door to their house, and dash off into the darkness. Only one boy shows up for school the next morning, leaving the teacher under suspicion. 

There’s a showman’s quality to Cregger that aligns him with puppet masters from Alfred Hitchcock to M. Night Shyamalan, even if he doesn’t have the same cult of personality yet, and he has some of Jordan Peele’s commercial instincts, in that he can turn original conceits into studio events. Yet Cregger has a storytelling dexterity and style that’s already become instantly recognizable, tied to the fluid twists of his mystery-box plotting, a willingness to gearshift into comedy, and a shrewd harvesting of WTF moments. It’s hard to say exactly what it all means in the end—on that front, Peele is well out ahead of him—but Cregger has mastered the fine art of playing the audience like a piano. Weapons is the rare movie where watching an audience react to it seems nearly as fun a prospect as being part of an audience reacting to it. 

The less said about what happens, the better, but Cregger shows some patience in setting it up, with a structure that follows certain key characters in overlapping chronologies. First, there’s Justine (Julia Garner), a first-year schoolteacher who naturally falls under suspicion and harassment from parents over the disappearance and turns to the bottle to cope. Then there’s Archer (Josh Brolin), one of those harassing parents, whose desperate bid to find his missing son leads him to pursue the case on his own. Other major players are Paul (Alden Ehrenreich), a bungling police officer with a thing for Justine; Anthony (Austin Abrams), a junkie who stumbles hilariously into trouble; and Alex (Cary Christopher), the quiet kid who turned up in Justine’s class the morning after the incident. 

All of these characters are worth knowing, which is a small but crucial victory in itself, given Cregger’s busy plotting agenda. He treats them with abundant affection, but he’s willing to scuff their nobility a bit to give them dimension, rather than lose them to this all-consuming mystery. For a premise as grim as missing schoolchildren, Weapons is tonally liberated in a way that’s more common to Korea than Hollywood, toggling deftly between uproarious comedy and Grimm-inspired folk horror without fretting over the change in cabin pressure. Much like Barbarian, when Cregger finally runs out of twists and gets to the heart of the mystery, he uncorks a finale of thrilling, nasty, breakneck intensity that pays the whole thing off. Neat trick, that. — Scott Tobias

Weapons opens tonight at theaters everywhere.

Freakier Friday
Dir. Nisha Ganatra
111 min.

Though 22 years separate Freakier Friday from its predecessor Freaky Friday, a pleasant-enough body-switching comedy starring Jamie Lee Curtis and then-up-and-comer Lindsey Lohan (itself a remake of a 1976 film), nearly everyone returns for the sequel. There’s Curtis and Lohan, of course, along with Mark Harmon (as Curtis’ husband), Chad Michael Murray (as Lohan’s crush), the two women from the Chinese restaurant with the magic fortune cookies, Lohan’s teenage bandmates, her annoying kid brother, and even the great Stephen Tobolowsky as the resentful high-school English teacher. Also making their returns are key plot points, like the resentment sparked by an impending marriage, and memorable scenes, like when a body-swapped mom has to pantomime playing the electric guitar while her daughter shreds backstage. The strip-mining of the first film is so shameless it should be advertised on the poster: “Now With 50% New Material!” 

So the good news with Freakier Friday is that if you’re hoping for an experience like the 2003 Freaky Friday, the filmmakers have done everything possible to accommodate you. But the risk aversion is so extreme here that all the unfamiliar elements stand out for being new, and they’re almost never an improvement. For starters, there’s the promise that this Friday will be freakier, so now instead of a mother and daughter switching bodies, there’s four women total under the same spell. Here’s how it goes down: Anna (Lindsay Lohan), now a harried single mother working for a record company in Los Angeles, falls in love with Eric (Manny Jacinto, of The Good Place), a high-end chef and widower from London. Anna and Eric get engaged, but their like-aged daughters hate each other. Anna’s daughter Harper (Julia Butters) loves to surf and wants to stay close to the coast. Eric’s daughter Lily (Sophia Hammons) is fashion-obsessed and a little snooty, and wants to move back home. 

There’s some confusing hocus-pocus involving a fortune teller (Vanessa Bayer), but at the end of it, Anna and Harper switch bodies and Lily swaps with Anna’s mother Tess (Curtis). At times, it’s extremely hard to keep track of who’s playing who or even why it’s all that meaningful. Lily and Tess have no big issues with each other to resolve, so that swap is mostly about Curtis looking horrified to occupy her own aging body. The comic situations in Freakier Friday tend to be cringe-y scenes with the opposite sex, like Harper-as-Anna rehearsing a wedding dance with Eric, or the horror or ecstasy of young people being old and vice versa. That’s about all you can do with a concept like this. Oddly enough, it’s the more sincere moments in Freakier Friday that work the best, because the manic, faux-screwball action slows down a bit and the characters can get insights on each other than they couldn’t in their real bodies. If they can practice a little more empathy in the future, perhaps the universe won’t need to get this freaky again. — Scott Tobias

Freakier Friday opens tonight in theaters everywhere.